We argue for the importance of looking at the microbiota-gut-brain axis from a human developmental perspective. For this purpose, we first briefly highlight emerging research with infants attesting that the microbiome plays a role in early brain and cognitive development. We then discuss the use of developmentally informed humanized mouse models and implications of microbiome research that go beyond probiotic administration.

Grossmann presents an exciting and interesting theory on the function of fearfulness. In this commentary it is argued that fearfulness may be a byproduct of a larger executive functioning network and these early regulatory skills considered more broadly may be key building blocks for later cooperative behaviors.

In Fig. 2 of the aforementioned article the mean value of the “chair” condition is incorrectly displayed as 0.011 when it should be 0.008. All statistics in the text are correct, and the conclusions remain the same.

Humans often behave more prosocially when being observed in person and even in response to subtle eye cues, purportedly to manage their reputation. Previous research on this phenomenon has employed the “watching eyes paradigm,” in which adults displayed greater prosocial behavior in the presence of images of eyes versus inanimate objects. However, the robustness of the effect of eyes on prosocial behavior has recently been called into question. Therefore, the first goal of the present study was to attempt to replicate (...) this effect. Additionally, it remains unclear whether the watching-eyes effect is driven specifically by reputation management or whether any cues indexing human presence more generally also have a similar effect. To address these questions, the current study compared prosocial behavior in the presence of eyes versus inanimate objects as well as other human features. The study was conducted as a field experiment at a children’s museum. Each week, the donation signs were changed to show eyes, noses, mouths, or chairs. Total donation amount and number of patrons per week were recorded. Participants donated more when they were exposed to eyes than to inanimate objects. We thus replicated the previously reported watching-eyes effect. Moreover, more money was donated when individuals were exposed to eyes than to more general cues of human presence. The current findings suggest that eyes play a special role in promoting cooperation in humans, likely by serving as cues of monitoring and thus eliciting reputation management behavior. (shrink)

This commentary is a call to action for researchers to create and use genome-wide association studies (GWASs) with previously missed age groups (e.g., infancy, elderly), which will improve our ability to ask important developmental questions using genetic data to trace pathways across the lifespan.

Two pillars of medieval English literature, Chaucer and Malory, stand accused by posterity as criminals, yet scholars remain perplexed about the nature of their crimes over five centuries later. Some convict them of the heinous offense of sexually assaulting a woman against her will, while others believe them guilty of no more than seduction or consensual sex. The allegation against Malory has even been reframed to portray him as a knight in shining armor rescuing a damsel in distress; (...) thus instead of seizing a woman in order to rape her, this author of Arthurian legends “stole” Joan Smith away from her abusive husband when Joan departed with Malory consensually. Keen to illuminate the personal lives of the authors whose Canterbury Tales, Morte Darthur, and other works opened up the world of the Middle Ages for posterity, contemporary researchers have seized upon medieval English legal sources to clarify these authors' own stories. The crime in which Chaucer and Malory have been implicated, of seizing a woman, confounds those historians and literary scholars seeking to explore these authors' late-medieval milieu because the word most frequently employed to record the misdeed is one of the most ambiguous legal terms in medieval England, and indeed Europe. When an individual seized a woman or stood accused of her seizure , the term's multivalent connotations mean that the offense might conform to either or both of our modern legal categories of rape and abduction. (shrink)

Requirements for business ethics education and organizational ethics trainings mark an important step in encouraging ethical behavior among business students and professionals. However, the lack of specificity in these guidelines as to how, what, and where business ethics should be taught has led to stark differences in approaches and content. The present effort uses meta-analytic procedures to examine the effectiveness of current approaches across organizational ethics trainings and business school courses. to provide practical suggestions for business ethics interventions and research. (...) Thus, the primary questions driving this research are as follows: what course characteristics moderate the effectiveness of ethics instruction?, and have ethics education and training efforts improved? Findings suggest that professional, focused, and workshop-based training programs are especially effective for improving business ethics. However, results also reveal considerable problems with many of the criteria used to evaluate the effectiveness of business ethics interventions. Practical suggestions for course design and evaluation in business ethics efforts are discussed along with future research needs. (shrink)

Ethical decision making is of concern to researchers across all fields. However, researchers typically focus on the biases that may act to undermine ethical decision making. Taking a new approach, this study focused on identifying the most common compensatory strategies that counteract those biases. These strategies were identified using a series of interviews with university researchers in a variety of areas, including biological, physical, social, and health as well as scholarship and the performing arts. Interview transcripts were assessed with two (...) scoring procedures, an expert rating system and computer-assisted qualitative analysis. Although the expert rating system identified Understanding Guidelines, Recognition of Insufficient Information, and Recognizing Boundaries as the most frequently used compensatory strategies across fields, other strategies, Striving for Transparency, Value/norm Assessment, and Following Appropriate Role Models, were identified as most common by the computer-assisted qualitative analyses. Potential reasons for these findings and implications for training and practice are identified and discussed. (shrink)

Caroline Franks Davis provides a clear, sensitive, and carefully argued assessment of the value of religious experiences as evidence for religious beliefs. Much more than an 'argument from religious experience', the inquiry systematically addresses underlying philosophical issues such as the role of interpretation in experience, the function of models and metaphors in religious language, and the way perceptual experiences in general are used as evidence for claims about the world. The author examines several arguments from religious experience and, using (...) contemporary and classic sources from the world religions, gives an account of the different types of experience. To meet sceptical challenges to religious experience, she draws extenisvely on psychological and sociological as well as philosophical and religious literature, probing deeply into the questions whether religious experiences are merely a matter of interpretation, whether there is irreducible conflict among religious experiences, and whether psychological and other reductionist explanations of religious experience are satisfactory. She concludes that religious experiences, like most experiences, are most effective as evidence within a cumulative style of argument which combines evidence from a wide range of sources. (shrink)

Research misconduct is of growing concern within the scientific community. As a result, organizations must identify effective approaches to training for ethics in research. Previous research has suggested that biases and compensatory strategies may represent important influences on the ethical decision-making process. The present effort investigated a training intervention targeting these variables. The results of the intervention are presented, as well as a description of accompanying exercises tapping self-reflection, sensemaking, and forecasting and their differential effectiveness on transfer to an ethical (...) decision-making task. (shrink)

Ethics applications to conduct research with children who have experienced domestic violence will frequently raise a red flag to ethics committees about the potential for risk and re-traumatization. On the other hand, such sensitive research can enable a hidden, marginalized population to have their voices heard. It can deliver findings about children’s lives that can inform otherwise adult-centric research, policy and practice initiatives. The authors highlight ethical concerns and practical solutions using examples from domestic violence, family law and child abuse (...) research with children. Ethical planning is explored according to methodologies, context and whether the violence has been named. Also discussed are consent procedures, confidentiality and the development of protocols for disclosure, distress, safety and risk assessment, which support ethical and safe research with children. (shrink)

In recent years, several countries have enacted guidelines and/or mandatory laws to increase the presence of women on the boards of companies. Through these regulatory interventions, the aim is to eradicate the social and labor grievances that women have traditionally experienced and which has relegated them to smaller-scale jobs. Nevertheless, and despite the advances achieved, the female representation in the boardroom remains far from the desired levels. In this context, it is now necessary to enhance the advantages of board gender (...) diversity from both ethical and economic points of view. This article examines the relation between board gender diversity and economic results in Spain: the second country in the world to legally require gender quotas in boardrooms and historically characterized by a minimal female participation in the workforce. Based on a sample of 125 non-financial firms listed on the Madrid Stock Exchange from 2005 to 2009, our findings show that in the period analyzed the increase of the number of women on boards was over 98 %. This suggests that compulsory legislation offers an efficient framework to execute the recommendation of Spanish codes of good governance by means of the increase in the number of women in the boards of firms. Furthermore, we find that the increase in the number of women on the boards is positively related to higher economic results. Therefore, both results suggest that gender diversity in boardrooms should be incremented, mandatory laws being a key factor to do so. (shrink)

The flip-flop trail is an object biography. It follows the translocal journeys of a pair of plastic sandals, unpacking the lives and landscapes hidden in the plastic. An important shoe-infrastructure enabling human mobility, flip-flops work as an offbeat proxy for globalization too. They proffer empirical footings in translocally-connected worlds in which people and the social textures and terrains of their everyday lives come to the fore, in place of economic processes and commodity chains favoured in hegemonic versions of globalization. These (...) reduce globalization’s complex social forms to the grand narratives of the logics of capital accumulation, implicitly naturalizing it, if critically, as inevitable, entrenched and robust. From the vantage point of the flip-flop trail, globalization looks rather different. It is more fragile and shifting, generating multiple forms of uncertainty in the lives and landscapes it simultaneously sustains and undermines. (shrink)

Caroline Guibet Lafaye | : Notre rapport à la propriété et à la propriété privée repose aujourd’hui encore sur une interprétation de celle-ci qui a émergé au XVIIe, par référence à un contexte qui était celui de l’état de nature. Bien que ce contexte interprétatif ait évolué persiste la prévalence d’une interprétation individualiste et substantialiste du rapport à ce qui est possédé. Notre ambition sera de mettre au jour d’autres modèles interprétatifs de la propriété qui ne soient pas avant (...) tout attachés à l’individu en tant que tel, dans sa singularité, mais qui se construisent par exemple à partir de l’attribution à l’individu de droits sur les qualités des choses. Dans un premier temps, nous identifierons les éléments (tels le Code civil) et les mécanismes qui ont conduit à construire la sphère familiale comme l’espace légitime au sein duquel se réalisent la négociation des biens et la transmission du patrimoine. Il s’agira, dans un deuxième temps, de concevoir la propriété par référence à une convention plutôt qu’à un état de nature, fût-il familial, et par référence à une finalité sociale plutôt qu’à des finalités individualistes. Enfin, nous envisagerons les reformulations possibles du concept de propriété privée et de propriété sociale à partir d’un contrat social plus juste pour l’ensemble des contractants. | : The contemporary conception of private property is still nowadays based on an interpretation of it that emerged in the seventeenth century, in reference to the state of nature. Although this interpretive context has changed, the prevalence of an individualistic and substantialist interpretation of what is possessed persists. In this paper, we will highlight some interpretative models of property which are not primarily attached to the individual but which are grounded on the entitlement of rights over the qualities of things to the individual. Firstly, we will identify the elements and the mechanisms that led to build the domestic sphere as the legitimate space in which to the goods are negotiated and the property transferred. Then we will propose an interpretation of private property referring to a convention rather than to a state of nature — even a familial one —, i.e. referring to social aims rather than to individualistic goals. Thirdly, we will examine the meanings of a concept of private property and social property taking into account the conditions of a fairer social contract for all. (shrink)

This paper describes a novel approach to teaching introductory-level students how to engage with philosophical texts, developed in the context of a philosophy of art course. We aimed to enhance students’ motivation to read philosophy well by cultivating habits of active reading. To this end we created a structured set of three assignments: instructor created digitally annotated reading assignments, a student digital annotation assignment, and required student participation in a collective GoogleDoc “repository of artworks, examples, ideas, and questions.” Student feedback (...) suggests that this set of teaching tools enhanced their sense of agency in approaching philosophical texts. (shrink)

Humans can follow different social learning strategies, sometimes oriented toward the models’ characteristics. The goal of the present study was to explore which who-strategy is preferentially followed in the technological context based on the models’ psychological characteristics. We identified three potential who-strategies: Copy the pedagogue, copy the engineer, and copy the friend. We developed a closed-group micro-society paradigm in which participants had to build the highest possible towers. Participants began with an individual building phase. Then, they were gathered to discuss (...) the best solutions to increase tower height. After this discussion phase, they had to make a new building attempt, followed by another discussion phase, and so forth for a total of six building phases and five discussion rounds. This methodology allowed us to create an attraction score for each participant. We also assessed participants’ theory-of-mind skills, technical-reasoning skills, and prosocialness to predict participants’ attraction scores based on these measures. Results show that we learn from engineers because they are the most successful. Their attraction power is not immediate, but after they have been identified as attractors, their technique is copied irrespective of their pedagogy or friendliness. These findings open avenues for the study of the cognitive bases of human technological culture. (shrink)

Coming to Life: Philosophies of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Mothering is a superlative collection of essays that does what too few scholarly works have dared: it takes seriously the philosophical significance of women’s lived experience. Every woman, regardless of her own reproductive story, is touched by the often restrictive beliefs and norms governing discourses about pregnancy, childbirth and mothering. Thus the concerns of this anthology are relevant to all women and central to any philosophical project that takes women’s lives seriously. In (...) this volume 16 authors- including both established feminists and some of today’s most innovative new scholars- engage in sustained reflection on the experiences of pregnancy, childbirth and mothering, and on the beliefs, customs, and political institutions by which those experiences are informed. Many of the topics in this collection, though familiar, are here taken up in a new way: contributors think beyond the traditional pro-choice/pro-life dichotomy, speak to the manifold nature of mothering by considering the experiences of adoptive mothers and birthmothers, and upend the belief that childrearing practices must be uniform despite psycho-sexual differences in children. Many chapters reveal the radical shortcomings of conventional philosophical wisdom by placing trenchant assumptions about subjectivity, gender, power and virtue in dialogue with women’s experience. The volume is diverse both in its content and in its scholarly approach; certain of the essays are informed by their authors’ own experiences, others draw from extant narratives; many engage such canonical thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche and Heidegger, while others draw from the works of contemporary feminists including Sara Ruddick, Iris Marion Young, Virginia Held, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. All readers, regardless of their philosophical training and commitments, will find much to appreciate in this volume. (shrink)

We agree with Rendell and Whitehead that cetaceans acquire knowledge from caretakers and peers, and that a clear understanding of this process can provide insight into the evolution of mammalian cognition. The passive observational methods they advocate, however, are inadequate for determining what cetaceans know. Only by experimentally investigating the cognition of cetaceans can we hope to understand what they learn through social interactions.

Résumé Le principe de précaution engage les rapports entre la connaissance, les risques et l’action ; appréhendé d’un point de vue simultanément éthique et politique, il pose également un défi aux institutions et au public pour ce qui est de sa mobilisation dans le débat et de sa mise en œuvre dans l’action, en tant que principe possédant une portée générale. L’article propose une description des problèmes spécifiques que comporte, à cet égard, le choix des interprétations. Cette description conduit à (...) une appréciation positive du nouveau rôle dévolu aux démarches participatives dans la discussion des enjeux éthiques et des risques acceptables. (shrink)

The mechanical properties of vertebrate cells are largely defined by the system of intermediate filaments (IF). As part of a dense network, IF polymers are constantly rearranged and relocalized in the cell to fulfill their duty as cells change shape, migrate, or divide. With the development of new imaging technologies, such as photoconvertible proteins and super‐resolution microscopy, a new appreciation for the complexity of IF dynamics has emerged. This review highlights new findings about the transport of IF, the remodeling of (...) filaments by a process of severing and re‐annealing, and the subunit exchange that occurs between filament precursors and a soluble pool of IF. We will also discuss the unique dynamic features of the keratin IF network. Finally, we will speculate about how the dynamic properties of IF are related to their functions. (shrink)

Probing semantic relations Exploration and identification in specialized texts Alain Auger and Caroline Barrière In recent years, several scientific ...

Bullying remains a pervasive problem in healthcare, and evidence suggests systems in place are not utilised due to perceptions of ineffectiveness and inequity. This study examines bystander responses to bullying and factors that influence decisions to intervene. We explore relationships between bystanders’ perceptions of psychological safety across three levels (organisation, supervisor and colleague) and reactions to witnessing bullying. We suggest psychological safety would be positively associated with the decision to intervene. Findings indicate the most pervasive reaction to witnessing incidents of (...) bullying is to discuss with colleagues, a low‐involvement reaction. We find perceptions of supervisory and organisational safety/support are positively related to high‐involvement decisions such as formal reporting of the incidents, highlighting the importance of support from those in power. However, perceptions of collegial support may lead to low‐involvement responses, which risk reinforcing and underpinning dysfunctional organisational dynamics by providing informal social and emotional responses that may substitute more formal organisational responses to this persistent problem. This study highlights the importance of support from individuals in power if bystanders are to feel comfortable making high‐involvement interventions. (shrink)

At one time, specialized health privacy laws represented the bulk of the rules regulating genetic privacy, Today, however, as both the field of genomics and the content of privacy law change rapidly, a new generation of general-purpose privacy laws may impose new restrictions on collection, storage, and disclosure of genetic data. This article surveys these laws and considers implications.

A seguinte entrevista, realizada no ODEERE, traz reflexões da Griot Marise de Santana à respeito de suas lutas envolvendo a carreira acadêmica, a religiosidade afro-brasileira e os aspectos de sua ancestralidade fortemente nuançada em sua prática docente, pesquisadora e militante. Buscou-se fazer de forma não linear uma apresentação da sua trajetória acadêmica, os espaços ocupados por ela, a repercussão de suas pesquisas, bem como sua vinculação teórica à outras e outros intelectuais brasileiros e afro-brasileiros. Por fim, aponta-se a necessidade de (...) mais estudos no campo das Relações Étnicas e contemporaneidade que tenham por objetivo precípuo a de(s)colonização do conhecimento e das ciências. Palavra-Chave: Marise de Santana. (shrink)

Background Discussions on ethical aspects of life-and-death decisions within the hospital are often made in plenary. The prehospital physician, however, may be faced with ethical dilemmas in life-and-death decisions when time-critical decisions to initiate or refrain from resuscitative efforts need to be taken without the possibility to discuss matters with colleagues. Little is known whether these considerations regarding ethical issues in crucial life-and-death decisions are documented prehospitally. This is a review of the ethical considerations documented in the prehospital medical records (...) of patients in a Danish prehospital setting for whom the decision to resuscitate or not was made at the scene. Methods The study is based on discharge summaries of all patients subjected to crucial life-and-death decisions by the Mobile Emergency Care Unit in Odense in the years 2010 to 2014. The medical records with possible documentation of ethical issues were independently reviewed by two philosophers in order to identify explicit ethical or philosophical considerations pertaining to the decision to resuscitate or not. Results In total, 1275 patients were either declared dead at the scene without exhibiting layman’s reliable signs of death or admitted to hospital following resuscitation. In a total of 62 patients, 85 specific ethical issues related to resuscitation were documented. The expressions of the ethical considerations were generally vague or unclear and almost exclusively concerned the interests of the patient and not the relatives. In the vast majority of cases where an ethical content was identified, the ethical considerations led to a decision to terminate treatment. Conclusions A strengthened practice of documenting ethical considerations in prehospital life-and-death decision-making in the patient’s medical records is required. We suggest that a template be implemented in the prehospital medical records describing the basis for any ethical decisions. This template should contain information regarding the persons involved in the deliberations and notes on ethical considerations. The documentation should include considerations concerning the patient’s end-of-life wishes, the estimations of the quality of life before and after the incident, and a summary of other ethical concerns taken into account, such as the integrity of the patient and frame of mind of relatives. (shrink)

Op-ed written with historian Caroline Light about some of the ways that ideas of democratic citizenship can become perverted by the idea that personal safety required armed defense against attacks by strangers.

Kants Ethik ist gut begründbar, es fehlt ihr aber anscheinend an Motivationskraft. Wie soll man nach Kant dazu bewegt werden, moralisch zu sein? Seine ethischen Schriften problematisieren, was die Anthropologie zu lösen versucht: Motivation zum moralischen Handeln. Diese "Lösung" steht in einer Tradition europäischer Moralistik, in der es darum geht, Moral anthropologisch zu reflektieren. Sie beschreiben einen Handlungsraum, in dem Regeln der Klugheit, Manieren und Höflichkeit und ein Konzept des "moralischen Scheins" das selbstbestimmte Individuum leiten. Die Aufgabe des vorliegenden Buches (...) ist es, Kant systematisch, also nicht allein historisch, durch die Leitfrage nach Motivation und Begründung in den Horizont moralistischer Ethik einzufügen. Die theoretische Verortung von Kants Moralsystem und seine Einordnung in die "historische Semantik" von Moral und Anthropologie nimmt Maß an Niklas Luhmanns Ansätzen zu diesem Thema.. (shrink)

"Dealing with the Visual will be of great use to advanced students because it offers an overview of current debates, and to graduate students and professionals in the field because the essays offer in-depth investigations of the methodological issues involved and various historical ways of defining visuality. The topics included range from early modern ways of viewing pictures and sixteenth-century views of Palladio's villas in their landscape settings to contemporary debate about whether there is life yet in painting."--BOOK JACKET.

Arthur Danto has written:I came to view that in writing about beauty as a philosopher, I was addressing the deepest kind of issue there is. Beauty is but one of an immense range of aesthetic qualities, and philosophical aesthetics has been paralyzed by focusing as narrowly on beauty as it has. But beauty is the only one of the aesthetic qualities that is also a virtue, like truth and goodness. It is not simply among the values we live by, but (...) one of the values that defines what a fully human life means.1Because beauty is so important to being human, it is worthwhile to study how people understand their experiences of beauty across the lifespan. How do children frame what beauty is? How do adolescents? How do... (shrink)

Acute aerobic exercise has been shown to improve fine motor skills and alter activation of the motor cortex. The intensity of exercise may influence M1 activation, and further impact whole-body motor skill performance. The aims of the current study were to compare a whole-body motor skill via a piano task following moderate-intensity training and high-intensity interval training, and to determine if M1 activation is linked to any such changes in performance. Nine subjects, aged 18 ± 1 years completed a control, (...) MIT, and HIIT trial followed by administration of a piano performance task. M1 activation was evaluated by measuring oxyhemoglobin and hemoglobin difference changes during post-exercise piano performance using functional near-infrared spectroscopy. The results indicate that piano performance scores were higher after the MIT trial, but not HIIT trial, compared to the control trial. A negative relationship was detected between heart rate during HIIT and post-HIIT piano scores. M1 activation was significantly increased after the HIIT trial. M1 activation was also positively associated with piano performance when exercise trials and all trials were combined. We found that acute moderate-intensity exercise led to an improvement in complex motor skill performance while higher-intensity exercise increased M1 activation. These results demonstrate that moderate-intensity exercise can prime the nervous system for the acquisition of whole-body motor skills, suggesting that similar exercise protocols may be effective in improving the outcomes of other motor tasks performed during regular routines of daily life. In addition, it appears that improvements in motor task performance may be driven by M1 activation. Our findings provide new mechanistic insight into the complex relationship between exercise intensity, M1 activation, and whole-body motor skill performance. (shrink)

We consider here how cultural and socioeconomic dimensions of justice beyond the state are related. First we examine cosmopolitan theories that have drawn on John Rawls's egalitarian liberal framework to argue that a just global order requires substantive, transnational redistribution of material resources. We then assess the view, ironically put forward by Rawls himself, that this perspective is ethnocentric and insufficiently tolerant of non-liberal cultures. We argue that Rawls is right to be concerned about the danger of ethnocentrism, but wrong (...) to assume that this requires us to reject the case for substantive redistribution across state boundaries. A more compelling account of justice beyond the state will integrate effectively socioeconomic and cultural aspects of justice. We suggest that this approach is best grounded in a critical theory of recognition that responds to the damage caused to human relations by legacies of historical injustice. (shrink)